Sources and parallels of the Exodus

The Exodus is the founding myth of the Israelites.^[1][a] The scholarly consensus is that the Exodus, as described in the Torah, is not historical, even though there may be a historical core behind the Biblical narrative.^[2][3]

Modern archaeologists believe that the Israelites were indigenous to Canaan and were never in ancient Egypt, and if there is any historical basis to the Exodus it can apply only to a small segment of the population of Israelites at large.^[4] Nevertheless, it is also commonly argued that some historical event may have inspired these traditions, even if Moses and the Exodus narrative belong to the collective cultural memory rather than history.^[5] According to Avraham Faust "most scholars agree that the narrative has a historical core, and that some of the highland settlers came, one way or another, from Egypt."^[6]

Egyptologist Jan Assmann suggests that the Exodus narrative combines, among other things, the expulsion of the Hyksos, the religious revolution of Akhenaten, the experiences of the Habiru (gangs of antisocial elements found throughout the ancient Near East), and the large-scale migrations of the Sea Peoples into "a coherent story that is fictional as to its composition but historical as to some of its components."^[7]

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